The first full-scale monographic study in English of one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century.In this first full-scale monograph in English on the German painter Gerhard Richter, the distinguished art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh maps the unfolding of Richter’s ever more complex and contradictory lifework. A painter in an age that disdains painting, a German confronting the impossibility of representing the historical trauma inflicted by his country upon the world between 1933 and 1945, a European artist in dialogue with his American counterparts, Richter (b. 1932) is shown by Buchloh to be a unique and singular artist, outside and beyond every other formation contemporaneous with his own development and evolution. What emerges from Buchloh’s detailed analysis of Richter’s key works is a far more complex set of painterly strategies than has been previously assumed, strategies that have inverted and relativized all the principles of the moderni
